Demand Media Announces Key Executives and Name for Proposed Domain Services Company

Company Will Lead Expansion of Generic Top Level Domains under Rightside Brand; Taryn Naidu Selected as Incoming CEO

November 05, 2013 09:00 AM Eastern Standard Time

SANTA MONICA, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Demand Media, Inc. (NYSE: DMD), a leading media and domain services company, today announced that Taryn Naidu, who currently serves as Demand Media’s Executive Vice President of Domain Services, will become the CEO and a Director of the newly formed domain services company that is proposed to be spun off from Demand Media. Demand Media also announced that it has selected the name Rightside Group, Ltd. (“Rightside”) for the spun off domain services business.

“It’s an exciting time for us, as new gTLDs start going live this year and our path to becoming an independent public company as a leader in our industry progresses.”

Rightside will be a Kirkland, WA based technology and services company for the Internet domain industry. The company will advance the way consumers and businesses define and present themselves online through a comprehensive technology platform making it possible to discover, register, develop, and monetize domain names. Rightside will play a leading role in the historic launch of new generic Top Level Domains, and the name represents a new way to navigate the Internet, while establishing the new company as the one to guide users in the right direction. It’s everything to the right of the dot – and beyond.

Taryn Naidu, who has led Demand Media’s domain services business since 2011 will become Chief Executive Officer of Rightside, upon completion of the separation. Additionally, Rightside executive management will include Wayne MacLaurin as Chief Technology Officer and Rick Danis as General Counsel. David Panos will be appointed as Chairman of the Board of Directors and Shawn Colo, Demand Media’s Interim President and Chief Executive Officer, will be appointed as a Director of Rightside in connection with the separation.

“Establishing the leadership team and brand identity of the proposed new company marks an important milestone in achieving our plan to separate our business into two distinct market leaders,” said Demand Media Interim President and Chief Executive Offer Shawn Colo. “I am pleased to announce a very strong executive team led by Taryn. This team has a wealth of industry experience, has played an integral role in building the largest wholesale domain registrar and is driving the transformation of this business into one of the largest end-to-end domain name service providers in the world.”

“Rightside’s mission will be to help millions of businesses and consumers define and present themselves online. We’re able to deliver on this through our distribution network of more than 20,000 active partners, one of the leading domain services technology platforms, a large number of applications for new generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs), and a deep bench of industry talent,” said Taryn Naidu, newly designated incoming Chief Executive Officer of Rightside. “It’s an exciting time for us, as new gTLDs start going live this year and our path to becoming an independent public company as a leader in our industry progresses.”

About Rightside

Rightside plans to inspire and deliver new possibilities for consumers and businesses to define and present themselves online. The company will be a leading provider of domain name services, offering one of the industry’s most comprehensive platforms for the discovery, registration, development, and monetization of domain names. This will include 15 million names under management, the most widely used domain name reseller platform, more than 20,000 distribution partners, an award-winning retail registrar, the leading domain name auction service and an interest in more than 100 new Top Level Domain applications. Rightside will be home to some of the most admired brands in the industry, including eNom, Name.com, United TLD and NameJet (in partnership with Web.com). Headquartered in Kirkland, WA, Rightside will have offices in North America and Europe. For more information please visit www.rightside.co.

About Demand Media

Demand Media, Inc. (NYSE: DMD) is a leading digital media and domain services company that informs and entertains one of the internet’s largest audiences, helps advertisers find innovative ways to engage with their customers and enables publishers, individuals and businesses to expand their online presence. Headquartered in Santa Monica, CA, Demand Media has offices in North America, South America and Europe. For more information about Demand Media, please visit www.demandmedia.com

As already reported by others FindYourDomain.com sold Trumpet.com on Namejet for a price of $57,500 domains on Namejet. DNN reached out to the buyer, Nokta Domains. Arif Şengören told DNN:

As NoktaDomains.com, we are still going on buying premium domains in order to refresh and improve our domain portfolio. We are mainly focusing on one-word or two-word generic, commercial domains and Trumpet.com was one of them.

We believe that, $57,500 is a fair price for a one-word domain and we are proud to be the owner of this domain. In a very near future, it will be impossible to find a one-word domain with 5 figure prices.

What do you think of the purchase price? What would you do with the domain?

As just announced in blog post, LeadRefs has just released their latest version of their lead generation tool. The new version of the tool now mashes up the data of the list of dropping and expired domains with the amount of leads available to sell the domains. It also has a paid membership now – the Search Package for only $24.99 or the Expired Package for $49.99 a month, which includes the Pending Delete, NameJet exclusive, SnapNames exclusive and GoDaddy exclusive leads along with 100 daily lead generation searches. The free trial is now limited to three days. For those who don’t have the time to follow all of the leads, the service now also offers a brokerage service.

Elliot’s Blog had a number of helpful posts as to how best use this tool:

After CO Internet, the operator of the .CO registry recently announced that their renewal rate was about 66% at the end of July and “expect to see somewhere in the nature of 68-69% renewal rates for July once all late renewals are totaled“. The first drop catching providers have now added the ability to go after expiring .CO domain names, with NameJet being the latest company to add the ccTLD. NameJet is also featuring pre-release .CO names from their partner registrars, such as propertytaxes.co and 204.co.

[Updated] As far as we and our readers here at DNN know, .CO backorders are currently available via:

The sheer volume of sales is likely due to the fact that Godaddy is one of the largest domain registrars that auctions off domain names that are expiring from it’s user base and Sedo is not. The comparison is a bit apples to oranges, yet the numbers are stunning. Namejet.com might be a better company to compare Godaddy with. Namejet auctions many registrar deletions at a starting price of $69 compared to Godaddy’s $10 starting price. It would be interesting to compare those numbers and we invite Namejet to jump in to this competition. :)

The data on the site also shows some interesting numbers about the amount of domains that are sold Buy it Now, Offer/Counter-offer and Auction. Again, the numbers are likely skewed with the Auction numbers receiving more volume because of the deleting names that Godaddy auctions. The Buy Now number is the one that is impressive. It would be great to see these numbers made a little more granular to know how many of those auctions were deleting/expired domains vs actual sellers and how many of the Buy It Now were Premium Listing names sold from home page searches.

The launch of this new section of the Godaddy site and the recent lowering of commissions seems to be a clear indicator that Godaddy is aggressively going after the domain aftermarket business. Kudos to Godaddy for sharing this data.

After a recent announcement by SnapNames for a price increase for catching dropped domains from $59 to $69, NameJet will be announcing to their customers in an email later today that they are dropping their price from $69 to $59 in a trial. It appears the prices have already been lowered on the site.

As we had reported earlier this year, Demand Media, parent company of numerous registrars, websites and a domain parking company, was planning to file for an IPO in 2010. According to an article by CNNMoney, the IPO has now stalled due to the regulator’s questions regarding Demand Media’s accounting practices.

The company’s CEO, Richard Rosenblatt has always insisted that the company was profitable, but the IPO filing revealed a different story, showing that the company is in the red for at least for $6 million USD for 2010. One of the reasons the filings are being investigated is that Demand Media expenses the cost of content creation over the course of five years, stating that the average time period this content will generate revenue for is 5.4 years.

Shane Cultra at DomainShane pointed out earlier that Namejet is hosting an auction of 3 letter .net domains, in fact more than 1000 of them at one time. The names were originally had a backorder deadline over the Thanksgiving holiday week but it appears someone wised up an move the closing date to get in on these auctions to today 11/29/10.

In addition to the .net domains Shane pointed out, there are nearly 1000 more 3 letter .org domains up for auction on the same day. Many of the domains being sold are not expiring domains though, rather they are a batch of names that appear to have come out of Marchex.

The whois of the majority of these domains currently shows privacy, but using DomainTools whois history we quickly found that the majority (if not all) of the list comes from the MDNH Inc portfolio, better known as the Marchex portfolio of domains. If you have a subscription to the service you can see an example with the domain see.net being owned by MDNH as recently as the first week of October 2010 and further back you can see the name was owned by Ultimate Search.

Wether it was a wise move to flood the aftermarket and put them all up for sale at once can be debated. It definitely wasn’t smart timing to put them for sale during the holiday week when most people aren’t sitting at their computers. As Shane points out, it’s tedious and cumbersome to even bid on multiple names at Namejet. Having them selling all at once is going to be a nightmare for anyone wanting to track or bid on multiple domains. I tried to put backorders on the entire group in fact and was told I entered too many domains. Not a good error to see when an auction is clearly selling in bulk.

Either way this large scale auction is sure to get some attention. A small sampling of the names at auction are posted after the jump. Check Namejet advanced search to find the full list . Backorders on this massive list need to be in by today at 8pm PST.

I’ve been working with Mike Berkens this weekend on a breaking story that has some scary ramifications for the domain industry. Mike just published the scary part of the story on his site. To sum it up, Chris Hartnett, a well known domain investor has been the victim of identity theft. The thief has used Chris’ name to conduct fraudulent business including bidding and purchasing names on NameJet as well as stealing domain names and putting them up for sale, posing as Hartnett.

From reports, there were over $60,000 worth of domains sold on Namejet to this fraudulent bidder.
Some of the names include :

booktools.com *

solars.com

browning.com *

hawaiifun.com *

premiumshopping.com *

casinotrust.com

datastructures.com *

pack.org *

virtualserver.net

w3w.com

tradewire.com

* names were transferred out to the “fake Chris Hartnett” bidder.

The identity theft part of this story is bad enough, and the damage to Chris is horrible. However, there’s another part that Mike didn’t cover and that’s the collateral damage, ie the other victims of these crimes in the domain space.

In the case of Namejet auctions, the fraud impacts Namejet, legitimate bidders and registrar partners. “Fake Chris Hartnett” ran up multiple auctions and cost legitimate bidders thousands of dollars. I personally was involved in an auction where “fake Hartnett” , if not exposed, would have cost me $12,000 dollars extra. At least 3 separate incidences occurred where “fake Fartnett” ran up domain prices on the auctions. Namejet has informed us that they are offering the customers a credit or offering to re-auction the domains. Imagine bidding and not knowing wether the bidder is real or some hijacker bidding against you with no fear of ever having to really pay for the domain.

Registrar partners of Namejet are likely not going to be paid for these names, yet they most likely have already transferred out domains to “fake Hartnett”. Registrars now are victims as well. Any name that “fake Hartnett” won may have been moved to a new registrar even and likely can’t be transferred back without a court order. Additionally, some registrars, like NSI and Fabulous, pay out money to former owners which will never be reimbursed. It’s a big mess.

In the case of the stolen domains that “fake Hartnett” put up for sale and sold. The real owners of the domain are out the domain. There could be potential legal battles now including registrars, brokers, the “real” owner of the domain as well as the new owner.

This is indeed a scary incident and one that should make all domain owners vigilant about keeping track of their domains. It should make all auction houses even more vigilant about the domains they sell and the people they allow to bid. It’s time that we start getting serious about security in this space and finding ways to catch and punish criminals like this.

Today sees the launch of a new drop-related services by the name of NameCatch, which we found via an announcement by user Erdinc on Namepros. Similar to FreshDrop, the site provides domain drop lists from a number of websites and allows you to sort and filter them by a number of criteria, such as languages and patterns. The subscriptions are based on the filters you would like access to and start at $3 for a 10 day subscription for searches that start or end with specific up to 50 keywords.

From their site:

NameCatch.com provides information on domain names, particularly expiring domains that go to auction. We scan big lists of domains every day for dictionary terms in different languages as well as word patterns such as consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel (CVCV).

We provide advanced search features which enable users to enter up to 50 search terms to do a bulk search on expiring domains. Most domain auction sites allow searching for one term at a time. If you have a list of multiple search terms and you want to check a few different sites, typically SnapNames.com, NameJet.com and GoDaddy.com, this can be a daunting task to do on a daily basis. But with NameCatch.com you can do it with a single ‘Search 50′ button.

NameCatch has also a domain tracking service. Whether you have a small list or a larger list of domains that you are interested in, you can enter these names to your ‘Track 10,000′ list and we will scan them for you every day and email you if any of them goes to auction.